Politics and New Media
"Twitter Revolution" New Media plays a fundamental role in our lives. New media has a big role in many fields and one of the most important fields is political and free speech . Recently, a lot of revolutions have succeeded in some countries in Middle East. Two of the most succeed revolutions were in Tunis and Egypt. New media had a significant impact on these two revolutions. Recently a lot of people get the news they want from the internet from different sources and one of the big sources and one of the fastest way to get news is that Twitter. People in Tunis and Egypt used Twitter as a tool of the revolutions. People in in Tunis and Egypt were using Twitter to communicate with each other and to communicate with the outside world(Youtube Link ). people in Egypt and Tunis were using Twitter because all different media belong to the government so they tarnishes the image of the revolution and give people wrong information. However, in Twitter all people can post things. Therefore, the audiences have the choice if they want to believe or not because they have more than one source. After that the government of Tunis and Egypt disconnected the internet because they knew it is dangerous to make people transfer all information they want. 2012 Presidental Campaign: The Twitter Political Index — Twitter calls it the Twindex for short — is a new attempt to make sense of the babel of commentary, observation, sarcasm, retweeting, calls to action and linkage that make up the Twitterverse. It is based on a huge "firehose" of data — all 400 million daily tweets — direct from Twitter to its development partner, Topsy Labs, which performs the analysis. That's a larger pool of data than previous analyses have used. But whether the Twindex can predict election results, reflect broad public opinion or even accurately represent what's really being said on Twitter isn't clear based on the current state of social media analysis, say others who have tried to do it. Twitter has grown explosively since the 2008 presidential election — users now send more tweets every 10 minutes than they did during all of Election Day 2008. News organizations chart how many times Obama and Romney are mentioned on Twitter and how many followers they have. The presidential campaigns are engaging in full-throttle tweeting: the candidates and their spouses tweet to supporters, while top campaign advisers cut and thrust with message-of-the-moment epigrams. Pollsters are very interested in social media analysis because of the volume of opinions expressed, says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. "It would be foolish not to examine the value of these millions of opinions. But there's a big 'but,' " he cautioned. Twitter users, 140 million worldwide, aren't a representative sample of the general population — for instance, they tend to be younger and, obviously, more technologically savvy. "My concern is, who are these people?" Newport says. As a result, "I don't think anyone has figured out whether it's truly useful. In other words, if a Twitter analysis can't predict who is going to win the election, what's the point? Social media like Twitter and Facebook "is where public discussions take place in new and powerful ways. But those conversations are not necessarily predictive of specific outcomes like elections, revolutions, or successful products," says Marc Smith, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation. Like sending a photographer to shoot pictures of a crowd at a political rally, "descriptions of social media discussion spaces can be important news," Smith says. "But we do not usually ask crowd photos to predict outcomes, even when they are newsworthy." Category:Law